January can be a month of teeth-pulling as kids filter back in from the holidays without another extended break in sight. This week I paired a “One-Pager” assignment with a handful of WHP articles to breathe a little life back into the classroom. Students took to it really well!
These were the interwar articles from the 1750 course:
- Global Story of the 1930s
- Communism in the Soviet Union
- Authoritarianism in Japan
- Fascism in Italy
- Fascism in Germany
Students read them one at a time, nightly, over the course of a week, with instructions to annotate for main ideas and vocabulary (people, places, events, ideas) that they thought was important. (Note - I used the lower Lexile levels to keep it accessible.) Armed with these notes, we had an accompanying lesson for each article on the following days. I am lucky enough to have block scheduling, so the students used the last part of class (25 minutes or so) to fill in a piece of their one-pager each day. There is something to be said for busting out a bucket of markers and colored pencils in 10th grade!
The finished products were telling. I could see from their visuals that students picked up on the characteristics of totalitarianism, the urgency created by the depression, the role of conformity, acts of military fascism, etc. Even the weaker examples contained some solid content.
The Blank:
Strong Examples:
Not As Strong Examples:
These were fun to create and fun to grade! I plan to revisit them next week as tools for drawing comparisons (pun intended) between various ideologies.
How are you encouraging enthusiasm in your 1750 classroom this month?
Todd Nussen Adam Esrig Tyrone Shaw Janet Mann
